August 31, 2010

"We need more detailed, researched, factual pieces which allow persons to formulate educated opinions and with effort and thoughtful discussion, more solutions. What isn’t needed is more incitement to anger." - Rayne (comment # 6 in this post).

If anybody takes Rayne's advice, and researches the Israel/Palestine conflict for at least two days, anger at Israel for its continual obstruction of the peace process, war crimes, and daily humiliation/occupation of 1.5 million people who live in a tiny strip of land is the normal, and correct response. An educated opinion about the conflict naturally leads one to be angry at Israel, otherwise, it's not an educated opinion.

Israel's three year blockade of Gaza underwent a change in July after the Freedom Flotilla massacre provoked international public outcry against the blockade. A cruel form of collective punishment, it forced innocent Palestinians to suffer through life without sufficient supplies of food, water, clothing, building supplies, and teaching material. Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, called the blockade a "flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law."

Israel's clever propaganda techniques masks its totalitarianism. It's harsh rulers, who are investing the country's fate in the powers of darkness and deception, reassure the world that Israel is the classical embodiment of the victim while it kills like a self-righteous king. In January, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy suggested that Israel go under psychiatric observation. It wasn't exactly a serious idea, but that didn't make it any less good. Sometimes it's the unserious ideas that make a difference in a person, or a country's life. Levy:

There are numerous reasons for the observation. A long series of acts that have no rational explanation, or really any explanation whatsoever, raise the following suspicions: a loss of touch with reality; temporary or permanent insanity, paranoia, schizophrenia and megalomania; memory loss and loss of judgment. All of this must be examined, under careful observation.

A society that can't self-correct itself is destined to destroy itself. And anybody who is a friend of humanity, and an admirer of the Jewish tradition, does not want to see the destruction of Israel, whether it comes at its own hands, or the hands of others. Breaking the silence about Israel's heartless violence towards Palestinians is necessary to create a true discussion about peace in the Middle East. We shouldn't speak in code, or mask our emotions about the most important issue of our era. Palestine is the real ground zero in the manufactured "War on Terrorism," - not the site of the destroyed twin towers, (plus building seven). And that's not to downplay the death of nearly 3,000 Americans on that day, or ignore the lasting pain that their families are in, but we must keep in mind that the state terrorism that Palestinians have experienced for decades has no comparison in the modern world. What Albert Camus said of Spain in 1948, that "For the first time men of my age came face to face with injustice triumphing in history," is true of Palestine today, where injustice and inhumanity has triumphed in the face of international silence.

In the past nine years, the "War on Terrorism" has been used to justify the ongoing destruction of Gaza by Israel, and the permanent occupation of Palestinians. During the same time, criticism of Israel has accelerated, due in part to Israel's own criminal aggression against its neighbours, but also because outspoken moral leaders like the late Tony Judt and Edward Said, Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappé, Richard Falk, Noam Chomsky, and Richard Goldstone have made it easier for others to be more critical of Israel.

I hope such scholarly criticism grows, and more influential leaders speak up. It is crucial, however, that we make sure criticism of Israel's actions doesn't turn into hatred for Israel, and its people. An entire people cannot be blamed for the actions of their leaders, not in Palestine, not in Israel, and not in America. As George Orwell wrote in his essay "AntiSemitism In Britain":

It seems to me a safe assumption that the disease loosely called nationalism is now almost universal. Antisemitism is only one manifestation of nationalism, and not everyone will have the disease in that particular form. A Jew, for example, would not be antisemitic: but then many Zionist Jews seem to me to be merely antisemites turned upside-down, just as many Indians and Negroes display the normal colour prejudices in an inverted form. The point is that something, some psychological vitamin, is lacking in modern civilisation, and as a result we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil.

I hold Israel's leaders responsible for Israel's crimes, not its people. The Israeli people are perpetually deceived about the need for security, and don't know of the role that their leaders play in the breakdown of peace negotiations. They are conditioned day and night to be afraid, and nervous about their future. And it is all unnecessary. This truth needs to be stated more often in the discussion about Israel/Palestine. Minds that are under siege by the state can be made to support any act of state criminality.

The same phenomenon that is happening in Israel is also happening in America, and the West, where propaganda about the unending crisis of terrorism is allowing the government to do anything it wants. That is why a new 9/11 investigation is so critical for peace. If the full truth is known, then the veil of the secret National Security State will be lifted, and the "crisis of terrorism" will be understood by all the people for what it truly is: a false threat used to hijack the liberties of countries, and misled people into supporting illegal wars, and state aggression. Also, let's not forget that Israel's Mossad gave birth to Hamas. Hassane Zerouky:

Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of the Islamist movement in Palestine, returning from Cairo in the seventies, established an Islamic charity association. Prime Minister Golda Meir, saw this as a an opportunity to counterbalance the rise of Arafat’s Fatah movement. According to the Israeli weekly Koteret Rashit (October 1987), "The Islamic associations as well as the university had been supported and encouraged by the Israeli military authority" in charge of the (civilian) administration of the West Bank and Gaza. "They [the Islamic associations and the university] were authorized to receive money payments from abroad."

Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years.

Israel "aided Hamas directly -- the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization)," said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies.

Israel's support for Hamas "was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative," said a former senior CIA official.

Understanding how the roots of terrorism are connected to state policy, whether in Israel or in America and Britain, will help us to move away from the mindset that we are facing terrorist threats, and allow us to map out a realizable peace in the Middle East for all peoples and nations. By identifying the American, Israeli, and British states and their intelligence agencies as the main culprits in the crisis of international terrorism, we will also be able to articulate our anger at the right people. And we have a right to be angry.

Anger is a healthy emotion, it should not be suppressed. It should be incited, because without anger, reform is not possible.

Read what Aristotle said about anger:

For those who are not angry at the things they should be angry at are thought to be fools, and so are those who are not angry in the right way, at the right time, or with the right persons; for such a man is thought not to feel things nor to be pained by them, and, since he does not get angry, he is thought unlikely to defend himself; and to endure being insulted and put up with insult to one's friends is slavish.

We must be angry at American, Israeli, British, Canadian, and overall Western leadership. It is a tragedy that we have tolerated their repeated failure in the handling of Israel/Palestine for this long. We can't be silent about anything, not 9/11, and not Palestine. It is an act of resistance to speak up, and express our anger, and we must do so every single day until we don't have to anymore.

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - Martin Luther King Jr.

By Juan ColeTuesday, August 31, 2010Here is the speech that I wish President Obama would give about the Iraq War, but which neither he nor any other president ever will.

Fellow Americans, and Iraqis who are watching this speech, I have come here this evening not to declare a victory or to mourn a defeat on the battlefield, but to apologize from the bottom of my heart for a series of illegal actions and grossly incompetent policies pursued by the government of the United States of America, in defiance of domestic US law, international treaty obligations, and both American and Iraqi public opinion.

The United Nations was established in 1945 in the wake of a series of aggressive wars of conquest and the response to them, in which over 60 million people perished. Its purpose was to forbid such unjustified attacks, and its charter specified that in future wars could only be launched on two grounds. One is clear self-defense, when a country has been attacked. The other is with the authorization of the United Nations Security Council.

August 30, 2010

An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday. Continued. . .

I was shocked when I heard about this story, but I am less shock of the verdict by the Israeli Army. I’m passed the point of getting mad at Israel. I don’t even think of it as a country anymore. I wish it was a country because the Jewish people deserve better. But it’s not a country, just as Nazi Germany wasn’t a country.

On some level I can understand why the soldier has the mindset of "shoot everything moving." I remember watching a documentary on TV about the experience of Canadian/American soldiers in the Middle East, and one very young soldier said something to the effect of, "you don’t know who the enemy is in Iraq, so everyone becomes the enemy, children, women, taxi drivers, everybody." This isn’t the exact quote, but it’s probably true that a lot of soldiers share that same sentiment. An occupying army can’t help but be at war with the entire population, from three year old girls to grandparents. Nobody is safe. It is Full Spectrum Dominance of a whole society. It is Total War. What the Israeli soldier did is what’s expected of him in the army – his job is to kill anything moving in Israel’s security zone. So it’s perfectly understandable why his superiors want to maintain troop loyalty, and protect him at all costs, no matter the crime against the oppressed population. The motto of any army; loyalty come first.

The greater crime is Israel’s system of control, and daily humiliation/occupation of Palestinians. It is absolute barbarism. Chris Floyd’s comments about the verdict:

After all, Israel is a "bastion of Western civilization" in the midst of all those swarthy savages, isn’t it? I mean, can there possibly be a clearer expression of civilization — especially its ultra-modern Western version — than Captain R’s Aristotelian formulation? It bears repeating — nay, memorizing, searing deeply into the brain and heart — for it is clearly the guiding principle of all our glorious terror-fighting democracies today, not only plucky little Israel but also its patron and paymaster, the United States

The Glenn Beck sideshow before a large, anxious, and unsuspecting crowd on the National Mall in Washington D.C. on Saturday, August 28, which is the anniversary date of MLK's famous "I Have a Dream" speech, has been compared by some to the early rallies of the Nazi party in Germany. A commentator named "Bluetoe2" pointed out in a FDL post written by Jeff Kaye about Glenn Beck's rally that, "Many in Germany thought the man that became the future Fuhrer was a joke and never took him seriously until it was too late." I understand this sentiment, it shows a lack of historical judgment to view Beck as just another loud-mouth TV clown, but it’s also a misunderstanding of history to think that what happened in Germany in the 1930s will happen in America. It won’t require a Hitler for America to slide into despotism. But, nonetheless, Beck is a malign influence in American politics. As Jeff Kaye writes; "Glenn Beck is one dangerous demagogue. He should not be underestimated."

Beck has successfully hijacked the Tea Party movement that began in Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign, and he is profiting tremendously from the breakdown of citizen trust in government leaders, and institutions. His moronic disinformation campaign is beyond belief. In this audio clip from his radio show he bashes Robert Greenwald's Brave New Foundation, the ACLU, Van Jones, Barack Obama, and connects them all together in one conspiratorial puzzle as though he's making a thoughtful, and coherent point about the covert "liberal" takeover of American society. The fact that this man could get thousands of people to join him in a rally in Washington is a truly unnerving development.

Along with the rise of corporate whores and right-wing demagogues like Beck, and Sarah Palin, there is a large-scale economic meltdown occurring in America. The crisis is so big that some economists like Marc Faber have said that there is a high possibility of a Weimar-style collapse in America. I don't know how factual his statement is, but it's worth considering because others have made similar predictions in the past few years. Noam Chomsky also compared Weimar Germany to present-day America in a conversation with Chris Hedges in April:

“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”

“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away."

Luckily, Glenn Beck is neither honest or charismatic. But that doesn't mean he's not powerful, he is providing a platform for more capable and star-quality leaders who will use his viewers for political gain. Plus, sincerity has never been a feature of Fox News, so it's unlikely that Beck's brainwashed idiots will see through his made-up public persona anytime soon.

It's not surprising that Beck's rally would reignite concerns of a fascist/Christian right-wing takeover. But I believe these fears are being exaggerated by some democratic strategists, and partisan liberals.

I highly doubt that a Hitler will rise amidst the ashes of a ruined American economy principally because of America's unique history, and its brave people. America's revolutionary and enlightened founders that gave birth to an idealistic country at the height of the Enlightenment are significantly better than Germany's early militaristic leaders who formed an aggressive nation that was surrounded by competing European powers. Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Washington have served as great models for generations of American political leaders. Compare them with Germany's Frederick the Great and Bismarck, who were the leadership influences of Hitler. Such a difference in political leadership between the two countries should not be overlooked. America has continually produced visionary and independent-minded leaders, from Lincoln to JFK.

Also, America's value of individualism, and self-reliance, as well as its democratic traditions, are the complete opposite of Germany's dependence on authoritarian leaders in periods of crises. Gordon A. Craig, a historian of German history, writes in his book, "The Germans" that German history is stamped with absolute obedience towards strong authority:

It is not too much to talk of a progressive bureaucratization of Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and a concomitant growth among the inhabitants of the German states of habits of deference toward authority that seemed excessive to foreign observers. These last may have had ancient roots--it was a medieval pope who called Germany the terra obedientiae--but there is little doubt that they were encouraged by the traumatic effects of the war. The daily presence of death, the constant Angst of which Gryphius speaks in his poems, made the survivors willing to submit to any authority that seemed strong enough to prevent a recurrence of those terrors, (Craig, The Germans, pg. 22).

When the German people experienced social and economic trauma in the 1920's and 1930s, Hitler won over the people by reminding them of how Germany dealt with past crises, and by touting Germany's cultural and racial supremacy. In the context of German history, Hitler's appearance was an understandable phenomenon. But an American Hitler would be an anomaly.

The majority of the American people wouldn't tolerate a raging dictator because they're less less authoritarian-minded than the people of Germany were in the early 20th century. They're also less warlike. Most Americans didn't want America to get involved in the "European war" in 1914, and they were also against America participating in World War II until the attack on Pearl Harbor that the FDR administration allowed to happen, so America has never been a war-mad nation. Americans see the idea of conquering other lands with total disgust, which is why the country's imperial establishment has to speak of "fighting for democracy and freedom" while it currently seeks to gain control of Central Asia.

And if martial law is ever declared in America, it will be more forcefully resisted than it was in Germany because the idea of civilian leaders taking orders from the military is considered perversely anti-American, and it is opposed most forcefully by military leaders, and military veterans, who all took an oath to the constitution of the United States rather than one single man.

Another point to keep in mind is that the main theme that runs through American history is not American exceptionalism or American supremacy, however much it is declared by its arrogant elite, but universalism, and the brotherhood of man. When Germany entered its conquering period, it conquered to spread the "spirit" of Germany throughout Europe, and for more land to be filled with future generations of the Reich. But when America conquers in the Middle East, it conquers for "democracy" and "freedom," which are universal values. The American people had to get tricked and deceived into fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. American leaders that didn't go around triumphing America's supremacy, instead, they paid lip service to America's gift of democracy to the Iraqi people. We should not treat this use of rhetoric lightly. It explains a lot. The neocons and political elite know how much the American people despise aggressive war, and would not stand for a war if America was viewed as the principal instigator.

Even with its ugly arrogance, and record of horrendous crimes, America is still the greatest country ever invented by the minds of men. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are documents that will be read hundreds, and thousands of years from now. Like the words of the Greek, and Roman statesmen, the words of America's founding fathers will be studied by future students, and forever cherished by true statesmen.

An American Hitler is unlikely, but I do have fears about explosive violence in America and other Western countries, as do many other people who see the same disturbing signs. But we can avert social unrest if all members of society become more self-sufficient, start to critically engage with their local governments, and build ties within their community. Depending on centralized authority to save us is a lethal hope. As we saw during Katrina, and other social crises around the world, the police are primarily skilled at killing people, and stripping their freedoms when the normal laws of civilized society break down. They can't provide security, shelter, or food for helpless people in any situation. More than anything, they become a burden on individuals in periods of social unrest, and crises. A healthy distrust of government could save America from either a technocratic, or a right-wing dictatorship; from either a Hitlerian or a Stalinist system of control.

I am wondering if you will start a Patriot Persons list to go along with your Patriot Groups list? If so, I'd like to apply. If your criteria* is the same for People as for Groups, I might be a pretty good fit!

I am definitely against any "New World Order" or "One World Government" scheme. The U.S. must remain a sovereign nation as outlined in our Constitution. (Besides, and I don't mean to be catty here, but the idea doesn't seem to be working out so bloody well for the EU.) Do you know if there is an active attempt by the U.S. government to join into a world government? If so, please let me know! I'd like to sign and circulate a petition against that.

I don't engage in groundless conspiracy theorizing; all the conspiracies about which I theorize have grounds. Do you think you could make an exception? And which conspiracies are the groundless ones? A list somewhere on your site would be helpful.

Also, how do you define "extreme anti-government doctrines", please? Can you give any examples? I am personally extremely pro-Constitutional governance, something which has been in short supply during the last few administrations, including the current one. I would only be anti-government about a government that was extremely anti-U.S. Constitution. Will this count for or against me?

I am glad to see Oath-Keepers made the list of Patriot Groups! I am a member of Oath-Keepers. They are educating military and law-enforcement personnel about the Constitution and Bill of Rights, encouraging them to keep their oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. Thank goodness! Since the Constitution is no longer adequately taught in our schools (having just educated two teenagers, I can attest to that fact), I am thrilled to see that someone has taken on this monumental task!

ANJALI KAMAT: Harry Shearer, talk about the distribution of your film. And your recent post on Huffington Post talks about "NPR—The Initials Stand for Nothing." Explain what you mean.

HARRY SHEARER: Well, NPR announced recently that they’re no longer National Public Radio, that the initials stand for, NPR. After I found out that they were not going to do a story about this film on either All Things Considered or Morning Edition, I decided to buy some time—you know, those enhanced underwriting announcements at the end of each half-hour. And NPR legal told me this language was unacceptable, quote, "documentary about why New Orleans flooded." The only language that they found acceptable was "documentary about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina." And when I told them it’s not about a hurricane, that was the end of the conversation.

August 29, 2010

America's near future looks hellish, but the country will bounce back, says Conrad Black. In his article, "Decline, but Not Inevitable Decline" Black reflects on America's current lack of leadership as it enters another historical crisis. He makes a lot of good points, such as the moral bankruptcy of the War on Drugs, the wasteful prison system, and the abject poverty of millions of Americans, but on other issues, like the War on Terror, he misses the mark. The whole article is worth reading, but here is the most important snippet:

As the problem is misdirection, not internal degeneracy or imperial overreach, it is a decline that will end in recovery, not a fall. It is like a non-terminal illness: America awaits a correct diagnosis, a curative plan, and a competent professional to supervise the recovery. The patient knows there is a problem and wants the cure. To paraphrase FDR, all that is missing is Dr. Comeback.

The corporate media wasted little time in seizing upon controversial Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s comments about Osama bin Laden being a U.S. spy to deride the claim as a far-fetched conspiracy theory, and yet the fact that Bin Laden was once a CIA protégé and has been used time and again to the benefit of the U.S. government’s geopolitical agenda is a documented fact.

It sounds like Fidel Castro has been reading Prison Planet.com, but the Guardian claims that the notorious revolutionary has “gone too far” in claiming Osama Bin Laden is a U.S. double agent.

The Cuban leader cites Wikileaks for his contention that Osama bin Laden is a CIA asset, but he went further in pointing out the fact that Bin Laden was routinely used by the Bush administration as a convenient boogeyman.

"This night is worth a world; it is the night of truth," French writer Albert Camus wrote in August 25, 1944, the day of the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation that lasted four years. The French people had a very visceral experience of tyranny, they knew who they were up against, and they were not under the delusion that the Nazis would just pack up, and leave one day. Their freedom had to come at a price, and "that price was heavy," Camus said, "it had all the weight of blood and the dreadful heaviness of prisons."

Our night of truth is far away from tonight. We in the West, but especially the honorable people of America, are not living under the Nazis, who were unabashed fascists. The evil of our day is not visible. We face a tyranny that disguises itself as holy, and gets its way by using techniques of deception, and secret acts of terrorism. It is a tyranny so well-hidden from the public eye that to even declare that we all live under despotic governments owned by bankers and corporations is deemed a sign of mental illness. The ignorant deny the scale of the tyranny, telling themselves that it is not as bad as "conspiracy theorists" like to think, and then smugly add that whoever talks of a grand conspiracy should not be listened to.

But the brutal fact is that there is a grand conspiracy to control the world's remaining oil resources, and institute a private, and dictatorial world government. If it was stated publicly the conspiracy would obviously be resisted by the American people, and the people of the West, but it is carefully hidden from their eyes, and any mention of it is ridiculed. The Enemies of the people operate in the dark, hiding their horrible crimes behind offiical statements, and justifying them as acts of law against internatinoal terrorism. They are a waging a hidden war against freedom, and self-government.

The official term for this hidden war is called the "strategy of tension," which entails the use of fear, propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, and false-flag terrorist attacks, and the secret state intelligence agencies of Britain, America, Israel, and other Western countries are actively practicing this strategy on the people of America, and the Western world so that they uncritically accept the criminal wars in the Middle East, and the police state laws at home. The combined effects of psychological warfare, and false-flag terrorist attacks on a society are difficult to comprehend by the casual observer of that society because he/she is the victim of these tools of hidden war. If he/she does not engage in serious study, or is educated through films or eye-opening books, then he/she continues to live as if the leaders of government are his/her ultimate protectors in this world.

Well-documented by several respected historians, confirmed by officialinquiries, and corroborated by former intelligence officials, the “strategy oftension” is one of those unsavoury moments in contemporary history that we don’tlearn about in school, or even university.

My favourite book on the subject, and the most authoritative in my view, is Dr. Daniele Ganser’s NATO’sSecret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (2004). Published in the UK as part of the “Contemporary Security Studies” series of London-based academic press Routledge, Ganser’s study is the first major historical work to bring the “strategy of tension” into the mainstream of scholarship.

During the Cold War, indeed through to the late 1980s, the United States, United Kingdom, and Western European governments and secret services, participated in a sophisticated NATO-backed operation to engineer terrorist attacks inside Western Europe, to be blamed on the Soviet Union. The objective was to galvanize public opinion against left wing policies and parties, and ultimately to mobilize popular support for purportedly anti-Soviet policies at home and abroad – most of which were really designed to legitimize brutal military interventions against nationalist independence movements in the “Third World”.

Vincenzo Vinciguerra, an Italian neo-fascist and terrorist, who was convicted for the murder of three police officers in 1972. Until he exposed their hidden hand in the bombings of Europe, Vinciguerra had the legal protection of Italian secret services which was connected to the secret network of Western military and political forces involved in Operation Gladio. In an interview recorded in June of 1992 from Allan Francovich's film Gladio, Vinciguerra explained the political purpose behind the state killing of innocent people, and why the "strategy of tension" was so effective:

You were supposed to attack civilians, women, children, innocent people outside the political arena. For one simple reason: To force the Italian public to turn to the State, turn to the regime and ask for greater security. This was precisely the role of the Right in Italy. It placed itself at the service of the State which created a strategy aptly called the "Strategy of Tension." In so far as they had to get people to accept that at any moment, over a period of thirty years from 1960 to the mid-eighties, a State of Emergency could be declared, so, people would willingly trade part of their freedom for the security of being able to walk the streets, go on trains or enter a bank. This is the political logic behind all the bombings. They remain unpunished because the State cannot condemn itself.

American civilians were not targeted by intelligence agencies in acts of terrorism during the years of the Cold War like European populations mainly because the American people had ingrained the false idea of the "communist threat" into their minds so much that they didn't need to be violently persuaded of its validity. Also, support for the left was stronger in Europe, while America's center-right political system was securely in the control of the National Security apparatus.

The "strategy of tension" is a frightening reminder of the corrorsive power of the modern secret state. There is nothing more threatening to humanity than centralized and unaccountable political power. Recent history is full of examples of murder by governments. In 1948, Camus wrote that the "evil is the State, whether a police state or a bureaucratic state. Its proliferation in all countries under cover of the most varied ideological pretexts, the revolting security granted it by mechanical and psychological means of repression make of the State a mortal danger for everything that is best in each of us. From this point of view, contemporary political society, in any form, is despicable," (pg. 78 from Camus's Resistance, Rebellion, and Death).

After the end of the Cold War Western intelligence agencies should've been drastically reformed, but because of the lack of public knowledge of its crimes all around the world, and its real purpose for existence, they grew stronger, and bolder. In the new century, the "strategy of tension" was re-introduced to create another global and generational war.

The leaders of the Coalition took advantage of the terrorist attacks in London to denounce, once more, the existence of an Islamic conspiracy and make a call to fight terrorism. However, facts speak for themselves: the operation was organized in the guise of an anti-terrorist exercise in which British public order forces were supposed to participate. Like in the 1980s, when the Anglo-Saxon secret services would organize bloody attacks in Europe to instil fear for Communism in the population, an Anglo-Saxon military group activates the strategy of tension to cause the “clash of civilizations”.

The next staged terrorist attacks could come any day, any hour, any minute. This fact is what makes the "strategy of tension" so beautiful if you are on the side of evil. It produces nervous feelings, and unease. It is sheer terror. Pure Machiavellian. You have the population in the plam of your hands, just waiting to follow what the government says next.

State of 9 - 1 - 1Totalitarian terror was unleashed on September 11, 2001 by U.S. government insiders and traitors in order to create social anxiety, and put the American people in a perpetual state of fear, making them uncritically accept wars in the Middle East, and police state measures in America. It's been nine years since the attacks, but the pass of time hasn't change the fact that 9/11 still represents a state of global emergency. In a society that is moved by the "strategy of tension," martial law can be activated by the manipulative rulers of the government as they wish. "At any moment," as Vinciguerra said, "a State of Emergency could be declared."

The profound and catastrophic nature of the 9/11 attacks was understood immediately by on-the-ground eyewitnesses, and observers around the world. Respectable news commentators, and the gossip fanatics who like to exaggerate every event were both on the same page about what 9/11 signified. In the late evening on 9/11, ABC news anchor Ted Koppel noted to his colleague Peter Jennings; "There's not a great deal that differentiates the tabloids today from the more serious newspapers." Koppel, who was in London, then listed the headlines of several British publications that were printed on September 12, 2001: Apocalypse. Declaration of War. Is This The End of The World? War On The World. The Day That Changed The World. Doomsday America. When War Came To America. It may have seemed like at the time that newspapers were only competing with each other for readership so they tried to come up with the catchiest headlines, but there is more to it than that. The in-your-face headlines tapped into the global psyche, and was an honest expression of genuine fright, and uncertainty about the future. The feelings of dread that we all experienced on 9/11 have not went away, in fact, there is a heightened sense of insecurity now, and every day feels like the Apocalypse.

Peter Jennings quietly remarked minutes later, as if it was superficial information, that; "It's interesting in a very minor way that several people today have noted the oddity of the date, ninth day of the eleven month, as the three digits of the emergency number 9-1-1." (20:20 to 20:34 in this video clip.) Jennings got the date backward, it was the eleventh day of the ninth month, but, having spent 12 hours straight on the air by that point, it's a tiny, and forgivable mistake. And the point he brought up about the date is much more significant than he realized. It was not a minor point at all. It symbolizes the unending state of emergency that we all live in. And it's a special kind of emergency, wherein the emergency services and authorities (the government) caused the crisis in the first place, so relying on them for help and guidance is a tragic mistake.

I've written about 9/11 a lot lately, but there's a good reason for that, it's too big of a state crime to let go. It makes me mad every time I think about what was done. The conspirators who committed this horrendous crime must not get away with it. They will have to pay severely one day. Our responsibility is to make that day come sooner, and help alleviate the pain and suffering caused by the attacks and its ongoing aftermath. Time is bearing witness to the unspeakable treason, and terror, and although it may seem like the forces of good are losing, the fight for truth and liberty is far from over. "The arc of history is long," MLK said, "but it bends toward justice."

August 27, 2010

This article is a challenge to global peace, freedom, and justice activists.The official government version of the 9/11 attacks breaks down when pressed with elementary questions. Without official media censorship, the story given by the Bush administration would've been deconstructed in a matter of days, and support for the War on Terror would've collapsed upon its first public announcement by the President. Our nine years of darkness and tragedy would've only lasted nine days.

Writers like Glen Allport, Jon Gold, David Ray Griffin, and others have already provided well-written reasons for why a new 9/11 investigation is necessary. I did not write this article to list in another fashion the evidence of an official 9/11 cover-up, but to confront those that are numbly accepting the government's tale, and challenge them to withdraw their approval of the official 9/11 conspiracy theory. There is no justifiable reason to go on believing that Al Qaeda was responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The events of that tragic day still shock today, but for reasons that are more terrifying than watching two iconic buildings with people trapped inside demolish into total dust on television. Looking back now, we can say with absolute certainty that they were not just acts of destruction by terrorists, they were also acts of treason, and of war, by state and corporate criminals who are still free today to commit more crimes, and atrocities. The longer we stay silent about the depressing facts, the more innocent people suffer. We can hold our nose but that will not make the rotten smell go away. Denial only produces further death and destruction. It is high time that we all grow up, and accept the most difficult truth of our age. It is partly our fault that we are led by the worst among us. By not speaking up, we are betraying freedom and truth even more scandalously than our government leaders. Our slavery is justified because of our timidness in the face of petty tyrants, and self-obsessed thugs. But if we stand in defiance, then the days of tyranny will grow shorter, and the size of tyrants smaller. History shows that the day of judgment is marked longer on the calendar of cowardice than of bravery. That is because the bold triumph quickly, whether they commit good or evil deeds, while the fearful unnecessarily suffer, and eventually die a regretful death.

The 9/11 truth movement spans political affiliations, race, generation, religion, and country. It is not a movement of extremism, quackery, or hate. It is a movement dedicated to justice, truth, and freedom. We are all in this together, but, it is also true that we all have individual decisions to make. Where do you stand on 9/11? What do you defend - scientific truths, or political lies? Who do you believe in - your own eyes, or government authority? Your answers to these questions will make a difference in the course of history. You are not a speck of dust in this universe. What you decide to believe matters. The evidence of a massive 9/11 cover-up demands your critical, and unbiased attention. We are at an unparalleled moment in history. Great psychological changes are happening in the minds of men and women across the world. The power of knowledge is slowly catching up to the power of secrecy. The truth, whatever it is, will help us recover our humanity, embolden us to radically reform our so-called democratic governments, and bring justice to the fallen, and their families.

"The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed." - G.K. Chesterton (from pg. 305 of his book Heretics).

More than six years have passed since I first became aware that the U.S. government lied about 9/11, so it is hard for me to think like a person that cannot see what is self-evident. After some study of history, and human nature, I am still dumbfounded at why so many people are adamant about the validity of the official story. Answering this question is a task that I am not qualified for. Neuroscientists, psychologists, anthropologists, scientists, and others who have an in-depth knowledge of human nature are better equipped to answer this all-important question.

Psychologist Gregory W. Lester's article from the November 2000 edition of the magazine The Skeptical Inqurier called, "Why Bad Beliefs Don't Die," helped me understand why some people are more hesitant to accept anti-establishment views than others. Lester says that some people are natural skeptics, while most people are not. He says that scientific proof is not enough to destroy false beliefs because people's beliefs are biologically connected to their sense of survival, their place in the world, and their personal well-being.

After reading Lester's article, it made perfect sense to me why the thought that government and corporate conspirators secretly plotted to bring down the World Trade Center towers is so threatening to a person that he/she does not even entertain it in his/her mind for longer than two seconds. Simply put, it is life-threatening to believe that such a horrific thing could be true. The survival mechanism in the brain is automatically activated when a person comes across dangerous information about his/her existence, which is what happens when you first read the frightening facts about 9/11. And the revelations go beyond what is regularly described as disturbing, they point to the truth that the U.S. government is controlled by evil and manipulative people who don't care about the freedom, or safety of the American people. The implications are grave because this truth literally signals feelings of death in a person, but as more time passes, a person gains greater familiarity with the facts, allowing his/her to psyche settle down, and to accept the new haunting reality as a fact of life. The next stage involves fighting to change that reality in whatever way one can, like spreading information about it so that more people wake up, and join the fight.

II. The Resistance To 9/11 FactsThere are three basic arguments made against the fact-based beliefs of the 9/11 truth movement. The first relies on authority, it is the "government is my daddy" argument. People of this mindset firmly believe that the government could not lie to them about an event of such great importance to their lives. Their worldview forces them to reject all factual evidence, and they lash out against anybody that breaks their imagined protective bubble. They naively think that because government authorities are equipped to investigate crimes, and answer puzzling scientific questions, it naturally follows that they will honestly present their findings to the public. They never stop to think that maybe the current leaders of the United States don't have the public's interest in mind.

The second argument rests on willful ignorance, and it is voiced by people who are too afraid to even take a look at the evidence. They say, "I'm just a layman. I don't know how buildings are constructed so I wouldn't know how they could be destroyed. I saw the plane hit the tower, and then I saw the tower fell. Boom. End of story." Unlike the authoritarian types, they don't fully trust the government, but they also don't trust their own judgment about such an important matter. They don't know what to think about 9/11, they just know that they don't want to think that government insiders did it. In reality, the official story is so obviously a lie that a simple layman can single-handedly defeat the government's "Al Qaeda" case in court.

The third argument is my favorite. We have all encountered it. It goes; "The Bush administration was too incompetent to pull-off such a big crime, look at Katrina, look at Iraq, all they do is screw up." The people who make the incompetence argument are well-educated, and tend to be liberals, they have the idea that the Republican party are a wrecking crew because they don't know how to govern. It probably never occurs to them that the reason the Republicans are so catastrophic for America is because they all want to do is loot the country, not govern it, and the same is true for high-powered Democrats. America's political class are self-serving opportunists, not incompetent buffoons. The Bush administration was filled with manipulative sociopaths, criminal corporate insiders, and twisted political minds. If they cared about New Orleans they would've prepared for Katrina. But they prepare because they didn't care. They didn't care about the people in New Orleans who suffered during Katrina, and they didn't care about the people in New York who died on 9/11.

Leftist critics claim that the 9/11 truth movement is committing a great disservice to the anti-war movement by highlighting the evidence for controlled demolition of the World Trade Towers. There are more "legitimate" reasons, they say, to resist America's imperial policies in the Middle East. But they are forgetting one important thing: the 9/11 truth movement doesn't exist to resist the wars, it exists to find the truth. That is a big difference. I am not anti-war. I am pro-truth. The truth trumps all political calculations. If Muslim extremists really did attack America on 9/11, and if Islamic fundamentalism really is a threat to Western civilization, then let's institute a draft in America, Canada, England, and other countries, and let's all do our part. I think it is shameful to avoid a real war for civilization and freedom while other men and women are fighting and dying. But the problem is that America is not fighting a real war in the Middle East. It is not fighting for freedom and democracy. It is fighting a manufactured war based on lies. In the quest for the riches of Central Asia, it is killing innocent human beings in their homes, and hunting down resistance fighters in mountains and back-alleys as if they were terrorists.The lie about 9/11 is a focal point. Revelations of direct government involvement, or government complicity in the attacks have the power to transform how government intelligence agencies operate, and change our world for the better.

Behind-the-scenes manipulations of our democratic governments have went unchecked for so long that large and organized sociopathic corporations along with secret intelligence agencies with unaccountable political power represent the greatest danger to self-government since the idea first came into being in the Greek world more than two thousands years ago. What further marks the severity of the crisis is that it is in its late stage. The American government was hijacked in 1913 by a private banking establishment. What must be done at this late hour, beyond the education of all the people, is to somehow address the psychological inability of otherwise normal human beings to face up to the haunting realization that high treason, and horrific atrocities have been committed in America's name for the last forty-seven years, and especially since 9/11 under the umbrella of death that is called the "War on Terror." 9/11 truth seminars should include mental-health education so that people don't get sucked into a perilous depression.

Like nothing else, 9/11 truth demands the conscience of our generation. If the 9/11 lie is not countered by citizens, then the controllers of the U.S. National Security State may commit even more egregious crimes against humanity, and our dark night will steadily get more terrible.

A new, honest, and criminal investigation of the 9/11 attacks is an issue of human survival. It does not make any sense to live this century through the eyes of war. We have done exactly that for nine years of total blindness, but there is no reason to do so anymore. The West is not at war with Islam, or with Al Qaeda. The West is at war with itself. And the fighters for human enlightenment, and human liberty must win this war.

Finding out the truth about 9/11 is key to winning the war for the mind of the West. One of the many smoking guns of the official 9/11 story is the controlled implosion of building 7. Visit the website Building What?, watch the 30 second television ad, and learn about the collapse of building 7. To be part of the effort to raise public awareness about the building, which was intentionally not included in the official 9/11 narrative, donate as much as you can to the website so that the ad reaches all homes in New York City.

I usually don't comment on these kind of stories, but I thought this was hilarious, and is yet another reflection of the total bankruptcy of the censorship media. Schultz, a MSNBC anchor, cried in front of his bosses for not paying him enough attention. Schultz is the jackass who shouted over Dr. Ron Paul like a madman because he didn't agree with his libertarian views. I have the utmost disrespect for him. He should be fired, and Cenk Uygur should take his spot.

The host of the network's 6PM show reportedly freaked over the lack of promotion the network gives him and his show.

"I'm going to torch this [bleep]ing place," Schultz is quoted as saying on a phone call in the studio. "[Bleep]ers!" he is said to have shouted upon slamming the phone down.

According to a Page Six source, Schultz "was furious the network was running election-night promos and he wasn't in them." He was "immediately dragged in for a meeting" with his bosses, NBC News President Steve Capus and MSNBC President Phil Griffin, who told him that he would be fired if he did that again. Schultz is said to have broken down crying.

At 5:21 PM on 9/11, Building 7 of the World Trade Center collapsed, even though it had not been hit by a plane – a fact that is important because of the widespread acceptance of the idea, in spite of its scientific absurdity, that the Twin Towers collapsed because of the combined effect of the impact of the airliners plus the ensuing jet-fuel-fed fires. The collapse of World Trade Center 7 (WTC 7) thereby challenges the official account of the destruction of the World Trade Center, according to which it was accomplished by al-Qaeda hijackers, even if one accepts the government’s scientifically impossible account of the Twin Towers. This fact was recently emphasized in the title of a review article based on my 2009 book, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7,[1] by National Medal of Science-winner Lynn Margulis: “Two Hit, Three Down – The Biggest Lie.”[2]

1. Why the Collapse of WTC 7 Created an Extraordinary Problem

The collapse of WTC 7 created an extraordinary problem for the official account of 9/11 for several reasons.

An Unprecedented Occurrence

One reason is that, because of the collapse of WTC 7, the official account of 9/11 includes the dubious claim that, for the first time in the known universe, a steel-frame high-rise building was brought down by fire, and science looks askance at claims of unprecedented occurrences regarding physical phenomena. New York Times writer James Glanz, who himself has a Ph.D. in physics, wrote: “[E]xperts said no building like it, a modern, steel-reinforced high-rise, had ever collapsed because of an uncontrolled fire.” Glanz then quoted a structural engineer as saying: “[W]ithin the structural engineering community, [WTC 7] is considered to be much more important to understand [than the Twin Towers],” because engineers had no answer to the question, “why did 7 come down?”[3]

Visual Evidence of Implosion

Equally remarkable, besides the mere fact that this building came down, was the way it collapsed: straight down, in virtual free fall, making the destruction of this building appear to be an example of the type of controlled demolition known as “implosion,” in which explosives and/or incendiaries are used to slice the building’s steel support columns in such a way as to cause the building to collapse into its own footprint. CBS anchor Dan Rather, not one to let a remarkable fact go unremarked, said:

“[I]t’s reminiscent of those pictures we’ve all seen . . . on television . . . , where a building was deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynamite to knock it down.”[4]

Dan Rather, moreover, was not the only reporter to make such a comment. Al Jones, a reporter for WINS NYC News Radio, said: “I turned in time to see what looked like a skyscraper implosion – looked like it had been done by a demolition crew.”[5]

Moreover, whereas Jones and Rather, being laymen in these matters, merely said that the collapse of Building 7 looked like a controlled demolition, experts, upon seeing the video, could tell immediately that it actually was a controlled demolition. In 2006, for example, a Dutch filmmaker asked Danny Jowenko, the owner of a controlled demolition company in the Netherlands, to comment on a video of the collapse of WTC 7, without telling him what it was. (Jowenko had been unaware that a third building had collapsed on 9/11.) After viewing the video, Jowenko said: “They simply blew up columns, and the rest caved in afterwards. . . . This is controlled demolition.” When asked if he was certain, he replied: “Absolutely, it’s been imploded. This was a hired job. A team of experts did this.”[6]

Since the first War on Terror was waged by those now carrying out the redeclared war, or their immediate mentors, it follows that anyone seriously interested in the re-declared War on Terror should ask at once how it was carried out in the 1980s. The topic, however, is under a virtual ban. That becomes understandable as soon as we investigate the facts: the first War on Terror quickly became a murderous and brutal terrorist war, in every corner of the world where it reached, leaving traumatized societies that may never recover. What happened is hardly obscure, but doctrinally unacceptable, therefore protected from inspection. Unearthing the record is an enlightening exercise, with enormous implications for the future.

The publication of the Introduction to Low Carbon Plot by Gou Hongyang, on this forum twelve days ago caused reverberations around the world. In it, we saw how China dismissed the purported scientific consensus on Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW), regarding its driving force rather as political—a plot by Western governments and business to protect their own lifestyles at the expense of the developing world.

That was the why. Today, we examine the how. In his latest dispatch, LibertyGibbert’s resident China correspondent, Locusts, has translated into English for us from the same book, Chapter 1.4: Standing Before the Great Enemy. You can navigate to it from the Rare Scribbling menu at the top of this page, or just click here.

In this excerpt, Gou Hongyang states categorically that any Carbon Tax proposed by the United States is in reality no more than a cynical economic mechanism to correct its trade imbalance with China. Gou argues that such a tax will wipe out the profitability of trade between those two nations, particularly in relation to electrical goods. Such an outcome would provoke a major Chinese economic downturn, with disastrous social effects, especially in heavily-industrialized cities.

If you are the author of this book, I would first like to thank you for giving my friends and I the opportunity to open our eyes. This introduction that I have translated has already received an extremely warm welcome. If you feel there are any problems with my translation, or are unhappy with it being on this website, or if you wish to contact me for any other reason, please contact the website administrator. Thank you.

1.The Winter in Copenhagen is a bit cold.

It was all forecastable. Owing to each parties different interests and priorities, the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (4C) was never going to result in a legally binding agreement.

The 4C was called, “The last chance to save humanity”. If humanity did not limit Carbon Dioxide emissions, “the planet is only 6 degrees away from catastrophe” etc. That the 4C did not reach any definitive final agreement left many disappointed and anxious, as every media outlet reported.

From newspapers, TV, and internet we often hear some frightening predictions. Along with the relentless increase in Greenhouse Gases, the unceasing warming of the entire world, large scale extinctions, melting of the Alaskan ice, Pacific islands that are on the verge of sinking in to the sea, the unceasing expansion of the Inner Mongolian desert and the shrinking of the Peruvian glaciers. ….

But there is a certain distance between reality and people’s fears. The cold winter weather at Copenhagen left a deep impression on attendees.

For the first few days of the conference, the winter wind wailed outside, and the last few days was pretty much full of big snowflakes swirling around, the snow reached a depth of 10 cm. As the 4C was in session, large parts of Germany were suffering heavy snowfall, with temperatures hitting minus 10. A lake in Bavaria even hit minus 33, the lowest recorded in Europe. 4 Eurostar trains halted under the English Channel in the emergency channel. This was the first time in 15 years that this kind of incident had occured; the doors of some intercity trains in Germany were frozen shut.

Far away Asia was also in the grip its usual cold winter.

At the end of December 2009, a gust of wind hit China. In the space of one night, in the northern part of Xinjiang, the temperature dropped below minus 30. At the start of 2010, the temperature in Beijing hit minus 16, the lowest recorded temperature for the last 40 years.

It was as if the freezing cold winter was having a laugh at all of these “Global Warming” theories. If the world was warming at an ever quickening pace, as all of these environmentalists say, then whence from such extreme cold? Whenever there are any doubts about Global Warming, it is almost as though environmentalists turn everything around and claim that this is too, a result of Global Warming. The Greenhouse Effect has turned in to a big basket, no matter what bad thing it is, just chuck it in.

After much anticipation, an advertisement featuring footage of Building 7’s collapse, soon be seen on TV screens all over New York City, will be unveiled on Prison Planet TV!

The “BuildingWhat?” TV Advertising Campaign is a movement-wide effort to blanket New York City with TV ads in the second half of September featuring footage of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7. The campaign is cosponsored by David Ray Griffin, Richard Gage, Niels Harrit, Kevin Ryan, Bob McIlvaine, Manny Badillo, and several other leaders and organizations. The campaign seeks to raise $500,000 in order to expose over one million New Yorkers to footage of Building 7’s collapse.

The reason why the mainstream media won’t air footage of Building 7 is quite simple – because that footage is the “Zapruder film of 9/11.” On the evening of March 6, 1975 more than 11 years after the assassination of JFK, the Zapruder film was aired publicly for the first time ever, allowing millions of Americans to see with their own eyes the brutal tragedy that had unfolded a decade earlier on a sunny afternoon in Dallas. A few seconds of footage refuting the fairytale of a lone gunman changed the way a people thought about the event of their generation, and public outcry led to a new congressional investigation.

Today Building 7 gives us that same opportunity. When a judge in a New York City courtroom says, “Building WHAT?” in response to hearing the words “Building 7”, it tells us just how well Building 7 has been hidden from public view. But two weeks of TV ads can begin to change everything. For months the New York City Council and Manhattan DA have been educated about the collapse of Building 7. It is now time to raise public awareness so that a handful of courageous officials will have the public support they need to stand up and demand the truth.

August 25, 2010

In the grand scheme of history, in the great wash of the collective American cosmos, in the midst of the day to day howls and earth rattles of towering financial and political giants, many of us tend to see ourselves as “the little people”. We consider ourselves inconsequential in the wake of epic events that appear to rise and fall like irregular tides and determined by some frenetic force of chance; a great cultural roulette wheel. In fact, we are often encouraged to emulate this belief. Better to roll with the river of difficult times than to fight against the current in a fruitless attempt at changing its direction. Better to let more important and more powerful men blaze the trails that we will later follow, right…?

Human beings have a strange attachment to the concept of the “decision makers vs. the decision followers”, even in the U.S. The Declaration of Independence was meant to herald the birth of a society which dissolved the separation between the rulers and those who are ruled. Our country was built upon the premise that every citizen has a right to participate in the making of his own providence, to play a part in the decisions that directly or indirectly affect his future. Of course, those were the days when average Americans saw themselves as giants, as innovators of history, not as little people.

Today, in the face of globalization, some American’s see the evolution of a rulership class as natural and even necessary.

It is a story the corporate media, with the notable exception of one lone Fox News affiliate, refuses to report. A former FBI agent, Don Adams, has compelling evidence Lee Harvey Oswald did not assassinate president John F. Kennedy. Adams was assigned to an FBI office in Thomasville, Georgia, on November 22, 1963. Adams was responsible for investigating Joseph Adams Milteer, described as a radical with connections to the States Rights Party and KKK. Milteer, according to Adams, was involved in Kennedy’s assassination.

As revealed by the Church Committee in the mid-70s and according to internal FBI documents the agency controlled the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists beginning in the 1960s. More recently, it was revealed that racist radio talk show host Hal Turner operated as a “national security intelligence” asset for the FBI, thus demonstrating the agency still has its hooks in the lunatic fringe movement.

The racist Milteer “was reportedly one of most violent men in the country,” Adams told Fox 8 News. Years later, Adams discovered that Milteer had threatened to kill Kennedy on November 9, 1963, and the FBI had lied about Milteer whereabouts. In order to make his case, Adams played an audio recording of Milteer for Fox News. In the recording, Milteer tells an informant the best way to get the president “is from an office building with a high powered rifle.” Asked if he was sincere about a plot of kill Kennedy, Milteer responded: “Oh yes. It’s in the works.”

Despite the threat and possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the president, the FBI and Secret Service allowed Kennedy to travel to Dallas. “[They] should have stopped the President from traveling instantly,” said Adams.

The Russians call it Kompromat - the use by the state of sexual accusations to destroy a public figure. When I was attacked in this way by the government I worked for, Uzbek dissidents smiled at me, shook their heads and said "Kompromat". They were used to it from the Soviet and Uzbek governments. They found it rather amusing to find that Western governments did it too.

Well, Julian Assange has been getting the bog standard Kompromat. I had imagined he would get something rather more spectacular, like being framed for murder and found hanging with an orange in his mouth. He deserves a better class of kompromat. If I am a whistleblower, then Julian is a veritable mighty pipe organ. Yet we just have the normal sex stuff, and very weak.

On the Dylan Ratigan Show, he interviews famed theoretical physicist Michio Kaku on UFOs. Kaku says that Leslie Kean's new book on UFOs "is as close as you are going to get to a smoking gun."

In her book, "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record" Kean documents how 5% of reported UFOs that have no earthly explanation. She tells how military and other government officials are coming forward to say that there is a "there" to the UFO phenomenon.

Kaku says that Aleins "could be thousands, millions of years more advanced." If so, Kaku feels that if they are that far ahead in technology then the Aliens could in fact be visiting earth. He says that advanced physics would make interstellar travel likely.

The purported UFO that pilots and other eagle-eyed professionals reported seeing almost four years ago, hovering above Gate C-17 at O'Hare International Airport, never went away.

Don't get me wrong. The aviators, United Airlines ramp workers, managers and aircraft mechanics all said they witnessed the dark gray, metallic, disk-shaped UFO leave the restricted airspace over O'Hare with such tremendous force and velocity on Nov. 7, 2006, that it pierced a hole of crisp blue air in the cloud-covered sky.

Hardly a day goes by that I don't receive e-mails or phone calls from UFO enthusiasts and researchers asking for an update to my exclusive Tribune story from New Year's Day 2007.

Chicago Tribune reporter Jon Hilkevitch off-air, and on-air interview with anchorman Jim Wagner of Chicago's CLTV, from January 2007. The two broke the story before it received national exposure, and worldwide media attention.

August 24, 2010

Professor Stanley Fish looks at the phenomena of 9/11 truth in his new piece in the New York Times called, "Truth and Conspiracy in the Catskills." Fish visited The Truth Gathering in Livingston Manor, New York that took place on Sunday, August 15, as an undercover columnist, writing, "I was the only insincere one in the room. I didn’t announce myself as a columnist looking for something to write about. I let them think I was one of them."

Aside from Fish's story, the growing 9/11 truth movement in the United States, and around the world has received almost zero mainstream media coverage in the West, perhaps the biggest reason why people have turned to the Internet for accurate news, reliable information, and informed analysis.

CNN, Fox News, ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and every other major news outlet in the Western media have not upheld the moral and political values of Western civilization: self-government, freedom, and reason. Journalists, and editors who have dared to cover the 9/11 truth movement have explicitly aimed to discredit, and demonize the largely decentralized group of activists, scholars, scientists, architects, engineers, firefighters, and police officers as "fringe losers" and "conspiracy theorists." But the truth is that the 9/11 truth movement contains ordinary people who pay their taxes, and take their kids to school. And they are not a minority. In September 2006, Time magazine published an article by Lev Grossman called, "Why the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Won't Go Away," who observed that; "This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality."

But, for whatever reasons, journalists in the mainstream media, and alternative media have kept silent about the reality of the U.S. government cover-up of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Regular people have resorted to learning critical information about their world the old-fashioned way; by talking and sharing information with friends, and strangers. In spite of the media and state gods, hundreds of millions of people worldwide have persistently questioned the official 9/11 story for almost nine years.

Jennifer Harper of The Washington Times gave one of the few non-slanted depictions of the evidence pointing to government involvement in 9/11 in her February 2010 column. She wrote:

"A lingering technical question about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks still haunts some, and it has political implications: How did 200,000 tons of steel disintegrate and drop in 11 seconds? A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center.

"In order to bring down this kind of mass in such a short period of time, the material must have been artificially, exploded outwards," says Richard Gage, a San Francisco architect and founder of the nonprofit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Mr. Gage, who is a member of the American Institute of Architects, managed to persuade more than 1,000 of his peers to sign a new petition requesting a formal inquiry.

"The official Federal Emergency Management [Agency] and National Institute of Standards and Technology reports provide insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers' destruction. We are therefore calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials," Mr. Gage adds.

The technical issues surrounding the collapse of the towers has prompted years of debate, rebuttal and ridicule."

Richard Gage, fonder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth, along with Professor David Ray Griffin, physicist Steven Jones, and Danish scientist Niels Harrit, who collectively have provided bulletproof evidence that the three buildings that fell on 9/11 were a result of controlled demolition, are not activists in any traditional sense. Gage is a registered member of American Institute of Architects, Griffin taught religion and theology at Claremont School of Theology, Jones is a physicist from Brigham Young University, and Harrit is part of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen. These men are not radicals who have grand ideological plans for the world. They are not against the government because it is the cool thing to do. And they can't be dismissed as ludicrous pseudo-intellectuals with nothing to their game. Far from being conspiracy nut jobs, they are brave truth-tellers who ought to be taken seriously.

But Fish, in the pattern of other so-called debunkers, decided to take the low road and trivialize Gage, as well as the whole 9/11 truth movement. He gets so many things wrong in his article that it is hard to know whether this is another piece of propaganda, or if Fish is actually a dittohead. In a lot of ways I hope the former is true because the resistance to 9/11 truth by propagandists is much easier to deal with, and defeat in the long run, than resistance by closed-minded zombies who religiously hold to the Bush administration's claims that Al Qaeda was responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The first error that Fish commits is characterizing the 9/11 truth movement as a collection of "left-wing conspiracy theorists." This characterization is completely untrue. In a poll done by The New York Times/CBS News in 2006, only 16 percent of Americans said that the Bush administration was telling the truth about the 9/11 attacks. 53 percent believed that the government was hiding information, and 28 percent was confident that the government was lying about the nature of the attacks. From this poll, and other polls, we can confidently conclude that the 9/11 truth movement includes Reagan conservatives, libertarians, radical left-wingers, and middle-of-the-road people. It is much less a political movement than a general truth-telling, and government reform movement. People are not attracted to 9/11 truth because it fits in with their preconceived ideas about the world, in fact, they let go of any previous political baggage, and undergo the baptism of truth. Many find out rather reluctantly that the left-right paradigm is a false political reality perpetuated by the two major political parties along with the corporate media, and that the real battle is between unaccountable centralized corporate power, and transparent decentralized people power.

The next mistake that Fish makes is comparing the reasonable questioning of 9/11 with the unreasonable questioning of President Obama's faith, and historical lineage. Fish writes:

"Like many others, I was aware of these theories and aware too that a significant percentage of Americans (about the same percentage that believes President Obama is a Muslim who was born in Kenya) was at least partly persuaded by them."

It's easy to put both camps in the same "misinformed and crazy" category, but any investigator that cares about the truth immediately finds gaping holes in the official 9/11 story, whereas the questions surrounding Obama's birth are less credible, and not all that important as far as public policy is concerned. The set of lies surrounding 9/11 have resulted in the deaths of one million people, the displacement of four million people, the invasion and destruction of two innocent countries, the loss of American freedoms, serious human rights violations, and trillions of dollars wasted in an illegal war on terror. Any revelation about Obama's background can't compare to revelations about the fraudulent and destructive war on terrorism that can only be ceased once the American people discover the whole truth about its origins, and the diabolical motives for waging such a war.

Fish, who has been described as the second most famous professor of English in America, after Henry Louis Gates Jr., is an ardent defender of political correctness, and exemplary of the stupidity, and blindness that plagues Academia.He once said that objectivity is dead, but neglected to mention who killed it.Judith Shulevitz, the culture editor of Slate, wrote a very critical article about Fish in December 1999 titled, "The Indefensible Stanley Fish." She said:

"Fish's sin, according to his journalistic critics, is moral relativism. He is the founder of "reader-response" criticism, which holds that texts don't have intrinsic meaning--meaning is a byproduct of the encounter between reader and text. He advocates campus speech codes, the ultimate in political correctness. He defends the cultural-studies journal Social Text and the field of "science studies," even after they were humiliated through a brilliant prank by physicist Alan Sokal. And yes, he is one of the highest-paid English professors around. He currently gets $230,000 a year from the University of Illinois. This, it is felt, does not reflect an amusing brashness. It reflects a lack of principle."

Fish, like other moral relativists, doesn't believe that truth can be reached through scientific thought, and reasonable debate, because everybody either has a secret political agenda, or they are under the sway of a particular ideology. He arrogantly dismisses that objective scholars, citizens, and scientists can know the truth. What's more disturbing is that he believes it is not necessary to know the truth even if it did exist, and could be known. He is more shrewd than foolish, Shulevitz observed; "Fish is a political realist, not a head-in-the-clouds theorist."

In my post from three months ago called, "The Citizen-Philosopher," I quoted philosopher Karl Popper who held that truth is worth knowing, but must be distinguished from the quest for certainty. Popper:

"Our quest for truth is an endless task, but we must distinguish that clearly from the quest for certainty. . . We want to find truth, but we never are sure whether we have really found it." - Karl Popper in May 1993, speaking to his former student and Professor Dimitris Dimitrakos on Greek television in Delphi, Greece.

Truth is worth knowing. It may take long, and it may be bitter, but there is nothing like it. It is more interesting than fiction, and scarier than lies. Fish's article should serve as a reminder to all of us that some of the biggest enemies of 9/11 truth are enemies of truth itself. We must swat away the relativists like Fish that are in academia with one hand, and crush down the propagandists in the media with the other hand. And for Fish, we should use both hands since he is more of a propagandist than a public intellectual. We must challenge their baseless assertions, and foolish worldview that 9/11 was committed by Islamic extremists. By finding the truth we can find grace. Without it, we won't be able to bring justice to the innocent human beings who are being killed daily in the war on terror, heal the wounded, or punish the wicked. If we do not sincerely seek the truth about the 9/11 attacks so that it can be demonstrated in court in front of the whole world, then we will never be full human beings. We will forever be stuck in the shadow of lies, and war propaganda, blindly killing each other for no good reason. And that is not a fate that I want for humanity.